TRYING TO TELL US SOMETHING?

As usual, PETA's getting ink by brewing up a brouhaha over something pointless. But now that they've made John Madden's fondness for Turducken a national issue, let me just add 2 quick thoughts: 1) Remember, you can't spell "Turducken" without "Turd," unless you cheat and use the alternate, more nonsensical spelling, and 2) what is it these guys have about stuffing one piece of meat up inside another? I mean, really.

ANIMATED ARGUMENT

Mark Fiore is a good political cartoonist who becomes excellent in animated form - especially when he's taking on the topic of Voluntary Regulation, i.e. how the meat industry gets to regulate itself. The cartoon's funny and makes its point well, but I can't help underscoring the fact that Fiore considers it common knowledge that the USDA is simply a tool of the meat industry rather than any kind of government watchdog.

BUNCH OF @#$%&!! TURKEYS

The USDA, a.k.a the meat industry's PR agency, has once again pulled off a great coup - this has made barely a blip in the news: That ol' JL Foods listeria recall from the beginning of the month - you know, the one for a measly 200,000 pounds? Well, testing from that plant's production has confirmed listeria ON the poultry products and the recall has been expanded to 4.2 million pounds - in other words, the entire summer's production of turkey products. Scroll - and scroll, and scroll - through this list of the varieties suspected of having the deadly, feces-based bacteria on them and you will be entertained or aghast, or both. Think about it: This is one of the plants that they actually caught. Happy Thanksgiving dinner!

KINDLER, GENTLER SLAUGHTER

Michael Pollan, of "Botany of Desire" fame, has written a thoughtful essay in The New York Times Magazine attempting to resolve the fact of animal slaughtering's unnecessary cruelty with the fact that we enjoy eating animals - at least, some of us do. For the first half of the article Pollan looks at the issue with eyes wide open and sees how lame the pro-meat arguments are, even going so far as to point out that any rationalization for eating meat, no matter how clever, is still a rationalization. Then in the second half he proceeds to provide just such a rationalization, and one which, unfortunately, makes him look like a complete idiot.

In a nutshell, Pollan's brilliant, unheard-of solution is to ignore factory farming, hope it will go away, and eat animals slaughtered personally by an old-fashioned, down-home farmer. This section is so rife with nonsense it's hard to restrain oneself from a point-by-point, but I'll limit it to two things: One, Pollan, who has in previous pages noted AR activists' ability to counter his knee-jerk arguments - because they've been around this issue and heard them all before - thinks he has come up with something the activists have never considered: How happy barnyard animals are to be frolicking in a cute little farm and how terrible it would be to deny them this happiness by not breeding more of them for slaughter. He goes so far as to claim AR activists - stuck in their urban ivory towers - have never seen animals in this state, a hilariously stupid blunder considering the traffic at animal sanctuaries, whose only difference from the environment Pollan lauds is the lack of slaughter in those animal's day planners.

The other point is that Pollan, ignoring the economics of the global situation, pretends that eating only organic and free-range animals is somehow a solution to a life-or-death ethical question. Not only is this bogus, it's been severely undercut by two news stories that appeared shortly after his essay: People buying "organic" beef at an upscale organic-food chain in New York found that they had been swindled into buying cruddy USDA-grade IBP beef because the store had cunningly switched labels; and a UK study found that chickens who spend more time frolicking outdoors are twice as likely to carry Campylobacter, a major - if not THE major - source of food poisoning. Oh well... time to think up another rationale.

DID SOMEBODY SAY... BANKRUPTCY?

All right, that's a little inflammatory, but then so is the practice of quickly cooking burgers, by its very nature. The point is, the epic deflation of McDonald's as bastion of rapacious capitalism, and all-around cultural battering ram, continues apace. The company closes restaurants, lays off workers, lowers prices even more absurdly, yet still gets panned by analysts as well as American consumers, who mostly continue to buy while asleep... but as they wake up, are picking places with more and better choices.

As for French consumers, of course, they simply go ahead and burn the damn place to the ground. Chacun a son gout, I guess.

GET-TOUGH AGRICULTURE DEPT.

On FRIDAY, *cough* at the same time Wampler was re-opening its listeria-outbreak-linked plant here, and the USDA was finalizing a presentation promising War on Listeria - just like the venerable War on E.Coli about three months ago - frustrated USDA inspectors were walking out of the old ConAgra plant in Greeley, CO, forcing the plant to close by their action. What plant was this? Why, the same one that cause the huge, second-biggest-ever recall in July due to, that's right, E.Coli! AFTER the huge recall, the plant had already been cited another 19 TIMES for fecal contamination. As the Denver Post explained in its opening sentence, "The federal government shut down the former ConAgra beef plant in Greeley on Friday after repeatedly finding feces smeared on meat over a period of several months." Don't worry, though, "smear" tastes fine once you cook it.


Really, though, what the hell kind of War is this? Why wasn't the plant closed after its FIRST infraction, post-recall? That's recidivism, isn't it? OK, so they give it another chance to really clean up its act. So why didn't the SECOND citation trigger some kind of stronger action? The THIRD? FOURTH? FIFTH? etc. etc. and etc.! How can anyone take this "agency" seriously?


UPDATE: Tuesday morning, the Denver Post reported that the plant is now reopening, and attempted to answer the number question above (though not, alas, the "seriously" question). An interesting fact I overlooked in the original shutdown story is that the whole thing was timed to coincide with a three-day weekend for the company, so it lost almost no production time. As one inspector said, "It just seems too perfectly planned." I guess that's how it is when you have the USDA as your PR agency. At least they can do something right.

GOT TROUBLE

Bad news about milk continues to pour in, but the US media pretty much ignores it. 900 Russians have just fallen ill from milk products - a pretty big outbreak, no? - and meanwhile, in New Zealand, it's apparently common knowledge that milk helps cause diabetes and autism, as a recent patent fight shows. Meanwhile here the celebs continue to take a check and accessorize themselves to the ongoing damage... OK...

ANOTHER RECALL YOU DIDN'T HEAR ABOUT

Cargill, this time under the nom de guerre of Skylark, again had a pretty big E. coli recall by traditional standards - 110,000 pounds - though not by our new 2002 Monster Recall standards. The news came and went on Friday. What're the odds?

HIGH-PROTEIN DIET KILLS TEENAGER

I was waiting to get a fuller story on this, but as I haven't found it yet, I'll post what is known so far: An otherwise healthy 16-year-old girl collapsed and died after two weeks on a meat-rich low-carb diet. Her doctors expressly blamed the electrolyte imbalance caused by the diet itself and ruled out possibilities such as an eating disorder. I dunno, maybe they're wrong. Maybe some other factor is going to emerge. But it's gotta make ya wonder.

NO MORE PLAY-BY-PLAY

Well, the USDA and CDC have proven so (take your pick) inept or apathetic that it's gotten to be quite tedious to report what the latest is in terms of each new plant fingered and/or cleared in the big deadly listeria outbreak. So I'm not going to keep on giving you that play-by-play. It obscures the big picture: Namely, that Wampler, like many other plants, had dozens of sanitation violations before this, meaning you can bet most of their poultry is tainted one way or another; that as the USDA now admits (despite their War on bacteria), their "food testing practices are 'not completely adequate' to deal with the amount of feces-encrusted meat being churned out of US slaughterhouses; and that the problem is very clearly and centrally located in the USDA's fealty to big business at the expense of ordinary people's (and animals') life and death: It recently emerged, for example, in a memo the agency is loudly disowning, that inspectors were given to understand that they could be held personally liable for any losses suffered by meat producers who were dissed by recall requests. Best quote from that article: "Poop is poop. I can't think of any circumstance where it is tolerable to have fecal material on any meat coming off the line." Yet as this latest fiasco makes clear, poop-covered meat is not just tolerated by the industry; it's the norm.

ANIMALS GET A FOOT IN THE DOOR

Let's not be deceived: The passage of the Florida amendment 'protecting' pregnant pigs is a small step, as is Oklahoma's ban on cockfighting. But they are steps in the right direction. Let's celebrate, but let's get more steps marching on up the road.

THOSE JOKE LAWSUITS

Yeah, it was a joke when the first fast-food lawsuit was filed. So howcum the Washington Post has just devoted an exhaustive story to examining the serious threat they pose, and another major paper's food cover is devoted to all the recent "healthy" changes in the industry? Someone ain't laughin...

THE 'COWS OVER KIDS' PROGRAM

An anti-hunger group, Bread for the World, has slammed the $752 million bailout for ranchers ("drought relief"), saying that it takes food out of the mouths of the hungry and shortchanges child nutrition programs. Bread for the World president David Beckman criticized "this obscene 'cows over kids' program," noting that with the Bush administration's largess to cattle producers, there simply won't be enough money left for the other programs. USDA officials have yet to rebut the numbers.

STRONG SMELLERS, STRONG FIGHTERS

I'll assemble the latest listeria news into another big entry tomorrow or so. But meanwhile, another study finding plant foods to fight cancer - in this case the family that makes all food great: Garlic and Onions! Mmmmmmm, I'm hungry already...

WHICH LISTERIA IS THE 'REAL KILLER'?

This time it wasn't on a Friday, but a Saturday (same diff, really) that another recall bombshell was dropped: Another supplier of turkey and chicken deli meat has issued a big recall - 200,000 pounds, or a hundred tons of meat - related to the big listeriosis outbreak in the Northeast. The timing of this is interesting especially in light of a class-action lawsuit expected Monday against Wampler - whose products you may have a hard time finding in the future, as they're using the venerable "duck and cover" strategy of changing their brand names (as though the Pilgrims Pride/Wampler thing wasn't tricky enough) in an attempt to shake off the growing stench of death. No wonder: Local stores report the recall is dragging down their sales of deli meat. Since Congress is once again jumping on the soapbox to ask "Hey, USDA, how come such a deadly fiasco has happened yet again?" the pressure is on to exonerate Wampler and quick, but let's be clear: Whether or not one of the seven (or ten, counting fetuses) dead was killed by Wampler products or not, the exact strain that killed those people was found at Wampler's plant. And what this, along with the new recall, all brings out is that there's so much listeria, i.e. feces, on so much poultry (and other meat as well, of course) that it's near impossible to nail down a single source - consider that the CDC, in this explainer, casually mentions that during the same time as the big outbreak of this particular strain, 81 other people in the area have fallen ill with different strains of listeriosis and 20 of them are now dead. The fact that the CDC considers this other statistic normal and everyday should tell you something about the safety of your average, non-recalled meat.

NOT ENOUGH FISH IN THE SEA

That's the headline a lot of papers went with on this Reuters story, and it gets across the mind boggling fact that as huge as the oceans are, they can't compete with the size of our appetite for animal flesh. For all of you who were opposed to factory farming and were just gonna switch to fish, don't you think you owe it to the poor developing world not to eat up all their fish?

MICKEY D'S BIGGEST CRITIC: MICKEY D

You've probably heard this by now already, but just for the record, McDonald's France says you should keep kids from eating there more than once a week. McDonald's USA claims the French were mistaking the word "week" for the correct word, "minute."

BILLION-DOLLAR COWBOYS

The power of meat to destroy individual health is plain and clear. But a lot of American taxpayers are unaware that we're losing at least $128 million a year -- potentially up to $1 billion -- subsidizing cattle grazing on millions of acres of our land across the West. This is according to a new study released last week. Public lands ranching is a boutique industry, supplying less than 3% of the nations beef supply, a cute hobby for self-sufficient would-be cowboys. The notion that "in the rural West, whole towns and school systems depend on ranching," as put forward in the above article by a National Cattlemen's Beef Association flack, is handily debunked here. It's not just the money, though, and it's not just the animals - it's entire ecosystems that we're helping destroy, all without most people's knowledge. Business as usual!

SCHOOL LUNCH HITS A NEW LOW

And yet another USDA-rolls-over-for-the-meat-industry story that seems to raise no eyebrows, much less set off any alarms: Irradiated beef is headed for the School Lunch Program, at the behest of the American Meat Institute. So the USDA, after feeding our nation's children dangerous feces-laden meat, rather than stepping back, taking responsibility, looking at the big picture, instead uses this screw-up as a tacit excuse for another backscratching bailout - this time of the meat-irradiation folks - shoving even more food of dubious safety down our kids' throats! What with Consumer Reports testing burger safety and finding it woefully lacking (including in ways irradiation will not counter), it seems that the solution proposed by PCRM makes more sense - stop forcing schools to buy cruddy meat, fer chrissakes! Let kids experience something other than the heart-destroying Standard American Diet. After all, if the folks at Johns Hopkins get their way, we'll all be skipping meat at least 52 days a year. Doesn't sound like a bad idea... for a start.

LISTERIA-NEVER-FEAR-YA

It looks as though the Wampler/USDA PR strategy, which seemed so bizarre as it was unfolding, has worked - another Sunday seems to have come and gone without any real journalism being done on this incredible story of lying, mismanagement and collusion. No one seems to want to know how come the CDC said the strain of listeria tied Wampler to the fatal outbreak, while the USDA says no it didn't. No one calls them when they say "we never said it *wasn't* connected to the outbreak." Here's one more - while previous reports specified that Wampler workers were continuing to work during the closure, it now emerges that the company has laid off many of them, apparently starting with the non-English speakers among them - if this story can be believed...